Rob Pegoraro

Figuring out what you’ll actually pay for your home internet service each month has often been like trying to follow a recipe with an incomplete list of ingredients. There’s the advertised price, but what will you pay after the promotional period ends? What about the cost for the modem you have to rent?

Most of the concern over the impending demise of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP)—the federal subsidy that’s made broadband cheaper or free for more than 23 million households—has focused on the people about to have a new hole drilled in their monthly budgets. Attendees at a DC conference hosted by an association of smaller telecom firms feel their pain: “Half of our problem in this nation is not accessibility, it's affordability,” said ACA Connects President and CEO Patricia Jo Boyers, at the group’s 

Recent telecommunications conferences have yielded one consistent disconnect – between wireless carriers seeking details about future spectrum allocations and government representatives offering vague assurances of better bandwidth to come. Consider the quizzing of Scott Blake Harris, senior spectrum advisor and director of national spectrum strategy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, at ForumGlobal's 12th Americas Spectrum Management Conference in Washington on October 10.

If you’re a Comcast subscriber, it’s not the most wonderful time of the year: The cable giant is raising its rates again. In a move subscribers have seen before – most recently in 2018, 2019, 2020 , and 2021 – Comcast’s TV service will see big increases in fine-print fees that it doesn’t advertise, while the large-print rates for its broadband will inch up by a smaller amount. Comcast didn’t provide specific numbers for the TV fee hikes, but journalist Phillip Swann, who covers the video business at the TV Answer Man site, recently reported figures for some markets.

The future-of-tech conversations at Web Summit  in Lisbon could have played on a split screen.

The broadband landscape looks different after the two biggest wireless carriers added more than two-thirds of a million subscribers to their residential 5G-based services. However, the two biggest cable providers both lost internet customers. On July 22, Verizon reported that it had gained 168,000 new residential customers to reach 384,000 total home subscribers for its “fixed wireless” service.

A new site aims to tackle a problem that in a more logical universe would not exist: real-estate listings that offer only vague details about the internet service available at an abode or don’t even address that issue. Fiber Homes promises less-chancy connectivity details in house listings. The Columbia (SC)-based site works with fiber-optic broadband providers to verify the access available at a home.

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge remains a believer in the bundle — just with different parts.

If you’d like a more honest assessment of whether AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless – or none of the above – will offer decent connectivity, you should seek an outside opinion instead of consulting the carriers' coverage maps. Some resources to do so are:

Cord cutting is coming to home internet access, not just pay TV – but not every embittered broadband customer will be able to fire their current provider and switch to residential wireless from T-Mobile and Verizon. Both carriers offer connectivity at speeds that may not match those of cable internet but should be fast enough for many home uses. They also don’t inflict cable’s data caps or modem-rental fees.